The new arrivals needed cash, so the first stop was a currency exchange booth. It took security very seriously. A guard at the door made Lestat show his cash before letting him into the booth then shut the door behind him so that no one else could enter until he was done. Out on the street, a pregnant beggar was accosting the rest of us. In an attempt to garner sympathy, she lifted her dress to show us the scars of a leg operation. It had the opposite effect on me. It wasn’t sexy, but the wound had healed well and it obviously didn’t affect her ability to walk. She either had enough support from the government or enough of her own money to pay for an operation, so why should we give her anything. When I – her last chance – refused to give her any cash, she spat on me. It was the only sense of superiority she had left and there was very little substance to it, so I shuddered briefly and turned back to listen to what the others were saying.
As usual, what I caught was meaningless – just a few words here and there. “… the … Bucharest … three …” I had no idea if that meant ‘one of the beggars in Bucharest had three ears’ or ‘the town hall in Bucharest is three times as big as the one in Paris.’ Keeping one ear on the conversation in the hope I’d pick up a keyword, I scanned the street to see if I could get a feel for how these people lived their lives. Further down the road, I saw the same beggar in trouble. One of the young men she’d approached got violently mad, kicking her repeatedly and shouting something obscene.
“Did you see that?” I said to the others. “That guy was just kicking the pregnant woman.” And I’d thought these people were friendly.
Akasha gave me a scornful look. “We’ve just been talking about this for the last five minutes. You’re in dreamland.”
There didn’t seem to be anything I could say to that, so I gave up on trying to find out why he was kicking her (my Romanian colleague later told me it was a rare case)or what had been said in the last five minutes and went back to scanning the street. Nothing else stood out before we had enough money and headed off again.
“What do you feel like for lunch?” It was such a shock to be spoken to without initiating the conversation that it took a couple of moments to realise Akasha was speaking English.
“Um…” I tried to remember what Romanian food I’d read about that sounded interesting. My trusty Lonely Planet was sitting at home because I’d bought the Eastern European edition and didn’t want to carry 800 pages around for the 80 pages on Romania when Akasha had 200 dedicated pages in her smaller French version. Before I could remember any of the dishes that had caught my attention, she said “too late. We’ve decided.”
The pause continued long enough that I realised she wasn’t going to continue. She wasn’t even looking at me any more. “Yes, but what have you decided?”
“We’re going to the markets to get some bread and tomatoes.”
Lunch was then eaten on a park bench. Like much of South America, it’s illegal to walk on the grass in the parks because it’s difficult to get it to grow. So five of us squeezed onto the one bench, juggling bread, tomatoes and cucumber on our laps. Finally the map came out and the planning began. Akasha and I had talked about what sights sounded interesting and I was confident that she understood my preference for settling in one place for a few days to get a feel for the culture. The only real touristy thing I was interested in was a castle near BraÅŸov. So I continued to listen with one ear – still hoping to catch a few words – and watched their fingers move over the map. From what I could make out, we were going to Sighetu MarmaÅ¢iei first, and then perhaps somewhere further east later on.
During the train ride, I let them continue their catching up and searched through my memories for what might have drawn them to Sighetu MarmaÅ¢iei. All I could remember was that it was the northernmost town in Romania, but that didn’t seem to be a big draw. Eventually, I interrupted their conversation to ask Akasha.
“There are some good museums there.”
Museums? I had no interest in museums. I was here to experience the way the people lived. Still, I was a hanger-on for this trip. I hadn’t even met Akasha until after they’d planned the basics. I was just happy that she’d invited me and that I could get my first experience of Eastern Europe. I nodded and Akasha quickly turned back to her discussion.
After a couple of hours of fragmented sentences, Jesse jumped up and said, “we’re here.” Everyone reached for their packs.
“But this isn’t Sighetu MarmaÅ¢iei,”I said, looking at the station name.
“We’re not going to Sighetu today,” said Akasha. “Hurry up.”
And so I found myself wandering through a village called Viseu de Jos in confusion. This place wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the Lonely Planet. I was sure of it. As a place to stop for a few days it seemed ideal, but that wasn’t what the others had in mind. I decided to leave asking why we were here until I had Akasha to myself, and concentrated on what was happening around me.
Jesse asked a local where we could camp and he was nice enough to walk us down to a field by the river before going on his way. I started looking for flat ground – rare in this lumpy field – and pulled the tent out as soon as I found it.
“What are you doing? Why would you put it up so far from the other’s tent?”
“Come on. It’s only a few metres. Do you want to sleep with them or me?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?”
It was the first smile I’d gotten from her since we’d met her friends, but it didn’t feel like a joke. I was about to say so when a shepherd passing by started shouting at us. Jesse ran off to see what the problem was and Lestat and Akasha followed.
“I think this is his field,” I said to Mekare in my best French. “He doesn’t seem very happy that we’re here.”
“Probably.” It was nice to know she acknowledged my presence, but the condescension didn’t inspire further attempts to talk. Fine. I had other things to do. I picked up Akasha’s pack and put it in our tent before she could turn the joke into reality.
“Do we have to move?” I asked when she came back.
“What? No. He was worried that the river might flood with all the rain and we’d be washed away. He was offering us his place to sleep tonight.” It sounded like a great option to me – a chance to see how a Romanian shepherd lived – but it seemed they’d decided not to take up his offer. “It’s great.” She smiled again, but not at me. “Romanian is close enough to French that I can make out a fair bit of what they’re saying.” She turned back to discuss this with the others.
I sat quietly through a dinner of leftover bread and tomatoes and then through the rest of the evening at a pub. It was more of a shack with a couple of tables and chairs for about 8 people. The tap she used to rinse glasses had so little pressure that it would have taken an hour to fill a bucket. There were a couple of unfamiliar bottles above the bar, but when I tried to ask the owner for a local alcohol, I couldn’t make myself understood and Jesse had to rescue me. I returned to the table with something like pear flavoured metho and listened to the others while Jesse stayed talking to the owner.
When she came back to the table, she was clutching an official looking piece of paper. “… wedding …” The woman had invited Jesse to her daughter’s wedding. These people were truly generous.
Back in the tents, I snuggled up to Akasha, delighted that I’d finally have someone to talk to. “So, how is it to see your friends again? What have you been talking about?” I asked as she reached for her book.
“We haven’t talked all day. Why do you want to start now? Go to sleep. I want to read.”
The ensuing argument faded into misery on both sides and the rest of the week was much the same. I wanted to scream at her that it was a tough situation for both of us, but at least she had friends to talk to. I had no one. But I knew how she felt. I’d been in her situation before and I hadn’t handled it any better.
I’d had an almost romantic friendship with one of my colleagues and when we went to Japan for a training course, the friend we stayed with put us in the same room to sleep. He’d obviously believed the rumours. So we spent our days together in training, our evenings together on the town and our nights together in the small bedroom. I was taking every chance I could to speak Japanese, and got frustrated when she kept asking what we were talking about. Eventually, I snapped and shouted at her to leave me alone. She cried. I knew I’d acted badly, but I couldn’t find it in me to apologise or try to include her. We still chat on the internet occasionally, but the friendship has never been quite the same.
I didn’t want that to happen with Akasha, so I trod as lightly as possible. I might have gone my own way but their plans changed so quickly that if I went off, we might never find each other again. On top of that, I had no money – only Akasha’s card had worked. And I had the tent – the other tent was too small for four people and I couldn’t leave Akasha out in the rain.
So I followed behind them, looking at everything through my backseat window. The country and its people were fascinating, but I can only speculate about the reasons behind what I saw.
Most obvious was the class gap. The next morning, while we were searching for a shop to buy bread for breakfast, I saw a number of strange sights. First was a bloke in a sports car, talking on his mobile phone and wearing… well, something trendy. He was parked outside the bar we’d gone to the night before that barely had running water. Further down the road, we had to step aside to make room for a large tip truck to pass a farmer’s cart loaded with logs and pulled by a single horse.
To my complete horror, the rest of the week was a series of tourist dots joined by a series of trains. We never spent two nights in the same town – unless you count the time we arrived at Gura Humurului at 3 one morning and slept in the station.
The next day, a train ride and a bus took us to Hărniceşti , famous for its wooden gates and wooden church. The gates were massive affairs. Striking as they were, the 3 foot high fences alongside them rendered them purely cosmetic. The church meant more to me. It was small and cozy with local tapestries covering every bench and wall. The woman who unlocked it for us spoke better French than me and told the others quite a lot. The only fact that I managed to catch was that it had been used as both a Catholic and Greek Orthodox church at different times in its history, depending on who was in power at the time. Perhaps this god is more tolerant than most history tells us.
We had dinner in a large shop on the main road and, like so many other occasions, we took most of our food with us, bought earlier at the market. The shopkeeper was quite happy with us messing up their only table when we’d given them no more revenue than it required to buy a loaf of bread. It was still owned by the government which probably meant the shopkeeper was on a wage and not worried about how much we spent.
Walking back to our campsite on the river, we lost our way momentarily. I looked down what I thought was our dirt road – but which turned out to be a driveway – and saw a light on in a hut. “Maybe they can tell us which way to go,” I said, but Jesse was already peeking in the door of the hut. She turned back to us and gestured for us to join her. Inside, we found a couple of men working at a distilling machine.
“They’re making tsuika.” I managed to catch it in French. Perhaps I was getting better.
The men were very friendly, inviting us inside, giving us – forcing on us – a glass of the potent alcohol, and explaining the process to Jesse. She translated for the others. As usual, no one translated for me but I got the idea. It was a partnership. Outside were barrels of last year’s apples from trees owned by one of the men. Inside was the distilling equipment owned by the other. While we watched, the machine man scraped the seal from around a pipe above the furnace and moved it aside. The apple man then carried buckets of fermented apple slop from outside and poured them into the vat. When he was done, the machine man replaced the pipe and sealed it with bread dough. The apples were boiled until the vapour rose through the pipe, then moved along until it was over a tank full of river water, pumped in from outside. There, it cooled and fell, cooling further until it dripped out a tap in the bottom into a bucket. Our glass had been scooped fresh from that bucket.
I came away from that experience elated. It felt like the first time I’d really gotten to join the locals living their life rather than just watching from my window. I would only have that feeling once more while with the whole group.
The museums ‘we’ chose to visit in Sighetu MarmaÅ¢iei were surprisingly interesting, focusing as they did on the culture and heritage of the Romanian people. One displayed Romanian armour, national costumes (which look decidedly South American) and the simple wooden furniture used in peasant’s homes. The museum had few visitors so the woman in the shop was delighted to show us around and explained everything to Jesse and the others. She tried to include me, but I had no idea what she was saying and if I asked any of the others to translate, I felt like I was depriving them of their tour, so I made do with the 4 word English signs next to each item.
The same town had an outdoor cultural museum that was effectively an entire abandoned village, complete with houses and farming equipment. Unfortunately, there were no signs in this one and we spent half an hour trying to work out how the oil press worked. Without a guide, I was on the same footing as the others, and I came the closest to understanding it – assuming I was right about a piece being missing. It was a giant nut cracker with one handled moved by a corkscrew lever. The logs weren’t close enough at the crushing end, so I surmised that there should have been a stand in the slot of the bottom one to meet up with the flat surface of the top log. Even so, we all decided, it didn’t seem to be able to crush many seeds each turn.
After such a full day, I’d hoped to find a place to camp, but it seemed we were on a roll. The next train took us to Gura Humurului and arrived at 3am. After a brief stroll around the dark town, unable to find a hostel open, we settled on the floor of the station. That was an amazing experience – not for the comfort, but to see the level of respect people gave us. Romanians are typically loudly aggressive people, as I’d found out in the embassy when applying for a visa. There, the diplomat and his countrymen had secretly enjoyed shouting at each other for hours while I stood shaking in the corner. In the country itself, people shouted at / to each other in the streets but I realised that there was no malice in it. But on that morning, despite the first train arriving at 6am and plenty of people waiting for it and the following trains, they all talked in whispers around the 5 heaps curled up on the floor.
That day I stumbled along behind all the others as we walked around to a series of monasteries famous for their painted walls. Unlike other churches, these were painted inside and out, and the pictures were violently graphic. While there was the occasional haloed man on a cross, the majority of scenes depicted haloed men driving swords into unhaloed kings and queens or enemy (unhaloed of course) knights.
I found two other distractions at these monasteries. The first was a priest tapping out a rhythm in the bell tower. I couldn’t see him, and we weren’t allowed up, but the first sounded to be made by some collection of sticks with different tones. He then began the same rhythm with the two church bells, then reverted to the sticks for the finale.
The second distraction was at the top of a separate tower, looking down on the nun’s quarters. Akasha and Jesse were in deep discussion so I looked silently over the wooden structure and the fruit garden surrounding it. Suddenly Akasha turned to me and spoke – what seemed to me to be her first unprompted words to me in at least 3 days.
“Jesse’s just telling me that the nun’s here have the best farming knowledge in the country. You can see the way they prune the trees to be spherical.”
Once I found my voice, I took up the conversation. “What does pruning the trees do? Do they produce more fruit that way?”
“Yes. It’s common practice in most countries, but the people here don’t know. The nuns might hire some people and show them how they want it done, but they don’t tell them why or teach other farmers. They just produce the most fruit and sell it all to fund improvements to the church.”
“Rather than helping people, which is their job…”
The two girls looked at me in astonishment – as though they hadn’t realised I was capable of independent thought. “Yes. Exactly.” Then, just as you might after hearing a dog talk, they shook themselves and went back into their discussion.
That night, the last before heading to BraÅŸov where Akasha’s friends would leave us, we camped on a local’s farm. He was a French teacher and most of his helpers spoke a little French too, so I was still the outsider and felt it keenly. With the rain pouring down, I felt closed in with our morbid group under the small sheltered dining area. We needed some more water, but the bottle we had was too tall to fit under the tap in the camper’s bathroom so I sloshed through the mud to find one of the helpers. I used one of the few Romanian words I knew, holding up the water bottles and asking ‘apa?’ She caught on and took me to the well. Many farmers still use well water as they don’t have plumbing. This one seemed to use well water despite having good plumbing. Like the others we’d seen, it was in its own little hut, with caged walls and a pyramid roof. She unlocked the wheel attached to one side and let it spin, lowering the bucket, then after a splash we wound it back up again. I had to squeeze between the well house and the fence to open the ‘gate’ on the hut before I could get at the bucket. When I returned to the dining area, the others all laughed at the child-like grin on my face. I didn’t care. These experiences were what I had come for.
Getting tickets wasn’t as easy as we’d hoped and the next morning, the four French were running around madly. When they finally stopped, I risked interrupting them. “So, what’s happening? Have we got tickets?” I felt so helpless, not even knowing what the real problem was.
“We’re going back to the first plan.” Which was? “I told you!”
“Hey! The plans have changed so often that I don’t know which one is which, so don’t shout at me.”
“Well, stop using that tone whenever you talk to me. It’s annoying.”
I knew that if I tried to say anything more, my despair would come through in my tone even louder, so I shut up for most of the trip. When I did speak, I kept it to a whisper so that there would be no tone to betray me.
I’d well and truly had enough of the other’s company by the last day and since we were staying in BraÅŸov for two nights straight, I had my first opportunity to go off alone. As soon as I could get away, I ran up the hill next overlooking the town to get some fresh air and to make a map in my head. Instead of finding a lookout, I found the large flag flying proudly at the peak, but surrounded by trees at the base so I couldn’t see the town. After a little more exploring, I ended up at a lookout point at the base of the cliff, and saw one of Romania’s most popular cities sprawled out around a central hill. The national flag flew from hundreds of buildings and houses all across the city. I’d noticed it even on farms in small villages and had to wonder at the national pride these people have. Perhaps it came from being under foreign rule for so much of their history. Once home, I asked my colleague about it and he said that the ‘hole in the flag’ would make a good symbol for these pages.
“The flag originally had the same three colours – blue, yellow, red – in the same vertical stripes, but there was an emblem in the middle that represented the five regions of Romania. When the communists took control, they replaced it with their emblem to represent the workers, but it was seen as a symbol of the oppression, so when we finally got free, many people cut the emblem out and flew it with the hole in the middle.” And so my symbol was found.
I really wanted to visit RaÅŸnov castle which I knew to be near BraÅŸov, but it didn’t appear in the French guide and I had no idea how to get there. If I’d had more time, I might have found a way to visit the more touristy Bran castle, famed for inspiring Dracula, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose Akasha on this last day. So I spent it buying supplies for the following week, peeking into churches, walking up the hill in the centre of town to see the wall and the citadel fort. In amongst all this, I still found plenty of opportunities to watch the people going about their lives – students sketching the panorama, children playing in the piaÅ£a and the farmers selling their produce in the markets. One guy in the markets showed me that teasing is the same all over the world, by miming to me that the girl behind the counter was attracted to me. While she blushed, the woman beside her nodded slyly and the young man escalated his antics to demonstrate dinner, dancing and whatever might follow. I ended the day with my energy restored, ready to face the next week alone with Akasha.
And that evening, I found a group of people I could talk to and who seemed quite interesting. To my surprise, it was the group I’d been travelling with for the last week.